MENG 210, FALL, 2005
BALSA-BRIDGE TEAM PROJECT
BEGINNING GUIDELINES
I. Education Research Findings
Team projects work best when 5 things are present (these are based on many educational
research studies into group learning activities):
1. Positive Interdependence: For one of you to succeed you must all succeed. One tip: assign
different principal roles for each member of the group (e.g., coordinator, draftsperson, tester,
constructor, group process monitor); overlap will and should exist, but having a leader for
each important element helps assure things don’t fall off the table.
2. Individual Accountability: No hitchhiking. Each individual’s project grade will be weighted
based on his/her teammates’ ratings of them.
3. Face-to-Face Interaction: Especially for a design project, you will work best if you have a
regular meeting time.
4. Social Skills: A successful design has at least as much to do with a well-functioning team as
it does with a well-implemented idea. Teamwork requires leadership, decision-making,
communication, and conflict management, so be prepared for more than an engineering
exercise.
5. Self-Assessment of Group Functioning: Periodically you will evaluate the other members in
the group to give each of you feedback along the way. E.g., what is/isn’t working? What can
we change? I will supply a form to help with this. If your group is not functioning as you
would like, please see me.
II. First Meeting
For your first meeting, in addition to running through your designs to this point, I suggest
you:
1. Agree on a common meeting time.
2. Assign roles/chiefs/heads (e.g., head coordinator, chief of drafting, chief of testing, chief of
construction, head group process monitor).
3. Write down your mutual expectations for each other (e.g., be prepared for each meeting).
III. General Design Tips
Design is challenging, confusing, rewarding, unpredictable, and exciting. Don’t be surprised
if you find this quite unlike your coursework to this point, and are unsure at how to go about
it. A few tips for the beginnings of a project:
1. Sketch out as many ideas as you can think of. Ideas in the head do not support any weight,
and it’s only through sketching and revising that good design is born.
2. Reserve criticism in the beginning, or use it only to improve the idea or develop another: non-
constructive criticism leads to blank sheets of paper.
3. Try to remember the promising aspects of abandoned designs—they might fit with something
in the future.
4. Keep ‘fuzzy dimensions’ in the beginning. You will nail down exact dimensions later, but
right now it’s best they are flexible to accommodate new ideas.
